Wine for sale: Flor de Caña

Flor de Caña

In 1875, Alfredo Fransisco Pellas Canessa—who was originally from Genoa, Italy—left for America. At the time it took six months to travel across the country and Alfredo decided to create a sea route between the east and west coasts of the United States via Nicaragua, reducing the journey to 35 days on a steamship. His plan was soon supplanted, however, by the construction of the Panama Canal and the American railroad. In 1890, he set up a cane plantation in Chichigalpa, Nicaragua, at the foot of the San Cristobal volcano. The Compania Licorera de Nicaragua distillery was built by the Pellas family in 1937 and the first bottlings of Flor de Caña released in the same year. The first rum with an age statement was released in 1959, when the brand began to be exported to neighbouring countries in Latin America. After an initial renovation in 1963, a second distillery was built in Honduras in 1973. Sales plummeted after the political revolution of 1979 and the rise in inflation. This led Flor de Caña to amass a huge stock of aged rums. A second renovation was completed in 1996 and Flor de Caña began being exported worldwide in 1999.